# [[Take Time to Read Other People's Good (and Bad) Code]] by [[Craig Larman]]

# [[Take Time to Read Other People's Good (and Bad) Code]] by [[Craig Larman]]

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# [[Integrate Early and Often]] by [[Gerard Meszaros]]

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# [[Apply Functional Programming Principles]] by [[Edward Garson]]

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# [[Write Tests for People]] by [[Gerard Meszaros]]

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# [[Reflection: Beauty or Horror?]] by [[Heinz Kabutz]]

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# [[Know your IDE]] by [[Heinz Kabutz]]

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# [[The Best Code]] by [[Chuck Allison]]

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# [[Beauty is in Simplicity]] by [[Jørn Ølmheim]]

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=== Not Planning to Complete ===

=== Not Planning to Complete ===

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# [[Collection of Collections Is a Code Smell]] by [[Kirk Pepperdine]]

# [[Collection of Collections Is a Code Smell]] by [[Kirk Pepperdine]]

# [[Planning for performance is not a premature optimization]] by [[Kirk Pepperdine]]

# [[Planning for performance is not a premature optimization]] by [[Kirk Pepperdine]]

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# [[Structure over Function]] by [[Peter Sommerlad]]

# [[Useful software is used longer than ever intended]] by [[Peter Sommerlad]]

# [[Useful software is used longer than ever intended]] by [[Peter Sommerlad]]

# [[Measure, don't guess]] by [[Kirk Pepperdine]]

# [[Measure, don't guess]] by [[Kirk Pepperdine]]

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# [[Allow faults to be diagnosable]] by [[Tony Barrett-Powell]]

# [[Allow faults to be diagnosable]] by [[Tony Barrett-Powell]]

# [[Instrumentation for Quality Control]] by [[George Brooke]]

# [[Instrumentation for Quality Control]] by [[George Brooke]]

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# [[Apply Functional Programming Principles]] by [[Edward Garson]]

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# [[Reflection: Beauty or Horror?]] by [[Heinz Kabutz]]

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# [[The Best Code]] by [[Chuck Allison]]

=== Suggestion Box ===

=== Suggestion Box ===

Current revision

Please note that this page is no longer being used for gathering contributions.

Create an account by clicking here. You don't need an email invitation to create an account.

Hi!

Welcome to the home page for developing the initial phase of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know is intended to be a book of wisdom for programmers collected from leading practitioners. There is no overarching narrative: it is intended simply to contain multiple and varied perspectives on what it is that you feel programmers should know. This can be anything from code-focused advice to culture, from algorithm usage to agile thinking, from implementation know-how to professionalism, from style to substance, etc.

Now that we have a suitable number of complete and high-quality contributions, we're looking to move to the next phase of the project, where we open up the existing items to the public for comment and further contributions. This looks like it will be mid-August 2009. Following that we will move to the final phase of the project, publishing a book with a selection of the 97 contributions that work best together.

Contents

What Will Come of All This?

This current site is for the initial phase of the project. In the next phase of the project, starting in August, O'Reilly will publish the contents of this wiki in a public and free web site off the O'Reilly properties. It will be free for anyone to access but you'll have to register to contribute or comment. Users (that's everyone who is registered) will be able to comment on other peoples contributions and create, edit, and improve their own contributions. Anyone and everyone be able to view the material without requiring registration. The web site will be strongly promoted by O'Reilly and all contributors will get full attribution.

After this, O'Reilly will consider taking the next step, which is to publish a 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know book. If a book is to be published, the best contributions and the contributions that fit best together will be selected and edited by me and Michael Loukides, an editor from O'Reilly. The book will sell in book stores and on-line. It will be listed as edited by Kevlin Henney. If your contribution is chosen, any recommended edits recommended will be contributed back to the 97 Things project for everyone to enjoy. Every contributor whose contribution goes into the book will be fully acknowledged in the book and will get a complementary copy of the book when it is published.

How to Make a Contribution

Each contributor is asked to provide one or more items (tips or bits of wisdom) that each have a title and associated discussion. The title should only be a 2 to 10 words long if possible and should summarize or capture the essence of the advice. In print, we want each contribution to fit on a two-page spread. Keep your discussion between 400 and 500 words. Any contribution under 400 words is unlikely to make it to the next phase of the project. And much more than 500 words will need to be edited down.

Create an account and author page. To create and edit a page you will need to create an account. You can then contribute your items and provide an author page. For more details on this see How to Get Started.

Please read the first contribution. I've added an example contribution in The Contribution section below to provide further guidelines on content style and to show you an example of what you will see when your are ready to add your own tip/axiom/pearl/guideline/contribution. Reading the initial contribution won't take long — it's not much more than 500 words!

Rules of Engagement

Contributors need to have an account and to create an author page. Instructions for doing this can be found here.

Minimize work in progress and work suggested but not started. Although it can be useful to put a place holder for an item, such as just its title or a couple of lines of content that are notes, please try to keep this to a minimum. It is more valuable to have submitted a few items that are complete and are of high quality than a long list of suggestions or partial submissions. Reducing work in progress makes it easier for you to see your own progress and for others to see the progress of the whole project. So, ideally, try to have no more than a couple of incomplete items at any one time.

Nominate others. Contribution is by invitation only, but you can nominate others for inclusion by contacting me with your suggestions.

Editing ethics. You have the ability to add or change your contributions at any time. To be a good participant, please edit your own contributions only. Be very careful that you don't accidentally alter someone else's work. As editor, I will limit my editorial changes to basic copy editing (spelling, punctuation, grammar, and formatting). I will discuss any other suggestions or comments on a contributed item directly with its author.

Protect the privacy of our site. Please keep this URL private sharing it only with people you invite personally to contribute. Don't link to it, digg it, put it on your web pages, send it out to a mailing list, etc. First, it's only temporary. This project will not live within O'Reilly commons indefinitely. Second, we'd like to keep this under wraps until we have a decent block of material to release.

Free of commercials. Please keep contributions free from references to specific products or technologies that compare their worth, or paint them in a positive or negative light.

Legal stuff. All contributions made to this site are required to be made under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that by making a content contribution, you are agreeing that it is licensed to us and to others under this license. If you do not want your content to be available under this license, you should not contribute it.

Volunteers only. Contributions are made on a volunteer basis — in other words, contributors are not paid for their contributions. The contributions will be made easily available to everyone on the World Wide Web for free. However, remember that those of you whose tips are chosen for publication will get your name attached to your work, your bio published next to it, and a free copy of the published book. Any item you contribute you can also reuse in any form you wish, such as in a blog posting.

Submit only your own work. You warrant that all work that you contribute to this site is your original work, except for material that is in the public domain or for which you have obtained permission. Feel free to draw from your own existing work (blogs, articles, talks, etc.), so long as you are happy with the Creative Commons licence.

The Contributions

Please add your contributions in the subsections below, placing them and moving them to the subsection that best fits the state of a contribution. For guidance on the mechanics of how to contribute an item, please see How to Get Started. The following is an example contribution you may find useful as a guideline:

Completed

Contributions in this section are effectively complete from the author's point of view, with some possible edits in the pipeline, and are ready to be moved over to the public site, mid-August. Items placed in this section must meet the word-count requirements (at least 400 words and not wildly over 500 words) and the associated author bio must also be complete.

Suggestion Box

This subsection is not for authored contributions, but for ideas you feel would benefit from being written about. You may not have the time, inclination, or background to write up a topic but still feel that it deserves to be covered. If so, please add a bullet below. And if you are looking for ideas for what to write about, please look at the list below for inspiration!

Program to an interface, not an implementation

Exception handling

Don't put core application logic in the UI code

Build tools

Postel's Law and/or preconditions and postconditions

Type conversions and type compatibility (languages have rules that can both help and hinder)

Concurrency

Team and collaboration

Algorithms and data structures (the importance of choosing the right ones)

Hardware basics that can affect program performance (such as caching level and instruction pipelines)